The Académie française, one of the oldest language academies in the world, represents a prototypical institutional body that supports strong monolingual ideology. This article sets out to understand its relevance and the normative stance it represents in a multicultural world. It analyzes the symbolic position that this institution still holds in and beyond France in light of the challenges associated with preserving a traditional monocentric language ideology in an era of globalization. In the last two decades, this ideology has been challenged by claims that French can survive as an international language only if it is open to legitimate influences from other cultures.

The purpose of this study was to advance the understanding of the influence geo-political events and legislation can have on the accommodation of minority language voters. Particularly, this study focused on the effects of (1) the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on minority language voters in the USA, and (2) World War I on minority language voters in Austria. We use a most similar systems design with our case studies. The results from the most similar systems design suggest that while both the USA and Austria have similar constitutional structures, are stable democracies, and have laws enacted to help protect the rights of minority language speakers (the VRA of 1965 in the USA, and Art. 8 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955), they have developed two different approaches to linguistic accommodation for minority language speakers at elections. This study has helped to further the researchers’ understanding of the influence geo-political events and legislation can have on the accommodation of minority language voters.

This retrospective overview looks back twenty years to the first series of reports from the field on a study of bilingualism and literacy learning. Continuing research in the same community during this period allows today for a reassessment of the claims, proposals and overall approach of the project. The particular language contact situation, that of indigenous language (IL)-national language (NL) bilingualism, adds an important dimension to the discussion, one that has attracted much attention in recent years: the problem of language erosion/language shift in the context of widespread mastery of, and expanding literacy in, the national language. This condition of language replacement still requires further study for the purpose of gaining clarity on important theoretical questions as well as pressing practical applications related to the development of language abilities among the new generation of school-age bilinguals.

Slavic constructed languages have been widely neglected by interlinguistics and Slavic linguistics so far; however, the number of projects for a common Slavic language has been growing since the 17th century, beginning with Juraj Križanić’s Ruski jezik (1666) and continuing up to Arnošt Eman Žídek’s Slovan (1940) and beyond. The construction of Slavic languages has recently been experiencing a revival through the spread of the internet since the 1990s. This has manifested itself mainly in three extensively elaborated projects with their own websites and user communities: Slovio (1999), Slovianski (2006) and Novoslovienski (2010). These three projects — one of them schematic, two of them naturalistic — are presented in the historical context of Slavic language construction from the 17th century up to the present and analyzed structurally in terms of their writing systems, their grammars and the composition of their lexicons. Although their chances of implementation in practice in the context of European language policy are currently rather marginal, they should be valued as a unique phenomenon in Slavic cultural history.